


And More It Cannot Die

by JulyStorms



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 14:30:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6960811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The house Roy's parents bought to fix up and sell was a steal—large and sprawling and cheap considering everything that came with it: original woodwork and glass windows, a chandelier, possessions supposedly belonging to the original owner...and the ghost of a young woman who died over a hundred years earlier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And More It Cannot Die

**Author's Note:**

> This was requested by letsgoboldlymotherfuckers on Tumblr for the three-sentence meme. Their prompt was: "Person A is dead and person B sees the dead" and as you can see I couldn't limit myself to just three sentences.
> 
> Title is from E. E. Cumming's poem, _[love is more thicker than forget]_.

It was hard not to believe in ghosts when he had seen his grandfather’s leaving his body the night he died. Roy had been eight at the time, and quite surprised, but in the grand scheme of things it hadn’t seemed very unusual. The apparition that was his grandfather smiled at him briefly, then faded away—and that was the end of that. Over the years, though, he saw dogs and cats and the occasional person—none of whom stayed very long.

His parents humored him for a time, but somewhere in his mid-teens, Roy stopped talking about it. It made him sound crazy, and if he wasn’t careful he’d look like the idiots on those ghosthunter TV shows: communicating with the dead wasn’t even something he had ever  _tried_. It was usually awkward enough just  _seeing_  them. When he did happen to run into them, they managed to pretend that they couldn’t see him, though this usually happened after surprise registered on their pale faces. In return, he did the same—averted his eyes or left the immediate vicinity. It worked out all right. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were there for his sake. They had their own things to do, probably. Ghost things.

Still, it came as a bit of a surprise to find that a ghost lived in the house Roy’s parents had bought to fix up and sell: it was their latest and greatest project; the enthusiasm was even shared by his interior decorator aunt.

“There’s just so much you can do with a place like this,” she’d babbled, encouraging his parents to snatch the place up before someone else with an eye for beauty could think to bid on it. “A little work here and there, and a lot of work with the pipes, and you can get a hefty turnaround profit, you know. Look, the woodwork is still original!”

Roy’s parents, newly retired and with a lot of spare time on their hands, were eager to begin work on the place. Roy, twenty-five years old and working at the Department of Building and Safety (not at all his ideal dream-job), had been roped into coming over to take a look around. His parents didn’t want to make any concrete plans until they knew if the changes they had in mind might require permits.

“We were thinking of adding an attached garage,” his father said, gesturing to the west side of the house where the kitchen came out onto a half-sunken-in brickwalk.

“Or a carport,” added his mother when Roy’s glance shifted out of the dingy kitchen windows. “Whichever will get us more bang for our buck. You know how it is.”

He definitely did. The windows were old, everything beyond them distorted by the old-fashioned glass. The front yard was overgrown with grass and weeds and the occasional wildflower.

“How long has this place been abandoned?” he asked.

“A little while.” His dad glanced over to his mom and cracked a smile. “I guess nobody wants to live in a haunted house.”

She rolled her eyes and waved a hand at Roy. “The ghosts chased away the previous owners,” she said. “I guess a few drafts closing doors in an old house equates to paranormal activity these days.”

Roy couldn’t help but agree, a soft sound in the affirmative; people often blamed old architecture drafts on ghosts, mostly for the attention it brought them.

His dad laughed. “I’m sure we can fix the draft problem, but we’re here to talk structural detail and permits. Over lunch, of course.”

“Sounds good,” Roy said, looking at the kitchen chimney, idly wondering when the house had been wired for electricity and if the wiring job was any good. Probably not. It would all need to be redone.

“Back in a half-hour, give or take,” came the reply from his mom. “You should look around while we’re gone—get a feel for the place.”

It was a good idea; even though his parents had already bought the place, it wouldn’t hurt to know exactly what it was they were getting themselves into.

The stairs creaked beneath his solid weight as he made his way up to the second floor. It would be silly to deny the appeal the place held; the old dusty chandelier in the living room had a measure of charm in it, and the view of the room from the balcony of the second floor was nice. Big houses weren’t made with such interesting architectural choices anymore, it seemed. Even the original woodwork was dark and attractive. Just at a glance Roy could tell that redone, probably in a lot of white, the house would look amazing—and more importantly would fetch a high price.

The second floor had dim bedrooms; the windows were all the original glass framed by dark wood and wide sills. The locks on the tops of them were functioning but when he tried to open a window it barely budged; the rope pulley had broken and the counterweight sat uselessly inside the window.

At the far end of the hall was a window seat framed by three windows; the cushions of the seat were worn and dusty, as if someone had once spent a lot of time curled up in it gazing outside. It looked down at what might have once been a small orchard and garden, but the area was in poor shape. Though it was easy for Roy to imagine that someone had once taken comfort in the sight, all it made him feel was sad.

He took the winding staircase up to the third floor.

The upper room was almost like a finished attic, one very large room done in floral wallpaper that had greyed and yellowed with age and was peeling quite badly in a number of places. The tiny hall was drafty—worse than the second floor by far; with the original woodwork intact, including the doors, a bit of a draft could send the heavy things slamming shut quite wildly. The thought made him smile a little to himself, amused as his mother’s comment about ghosts came back to him.

It was easy to concoct stories of ghosts in a house that _looked_ as if it ought to be haunted.

And this one certainly did.

Had he not finished touring the upper room, he might have continued to believe that the haunting of this particular house was little more than a story to generate interest in a dilapidated building whose internal structure still seemed fairly solid—a rarity, considering the times—but at the back of the room, behind a few dusty crates and a shabby carpetbag stacked onto a sagging bookshelf, he stumbled into something undeniably odd: sitting quietly at a table in front of a small, round window was a washed-out figure. 

“What are you doing?” he asked, thinking at first that a runaway teenager had made their home in the place.

The figure’s eyes lifted, surprise flickering through what he could see of their expression as they turned to regard him. “Mathematics,” she said after a moment, voice clearly feminine. “I always do my studies at this time of day.”

Any reasonable fellow would have left immediately, would have pretended he hadn’t seen anything, let alone heard it—might have even convinced himself that it was a prank by a local teen. But considering some of the people he knew, and some of the things he’d seen, it almost seemed perfectly sane to be laying his eyes on a ghostly visage of a girl doing her math homework.

In fact, all it really managed to do was pique his interest.

He had seen a lot of ghosts—or at least, figures he had assumed were ghosts. This was the first time he had really tried _talking_ to one. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the experience so far was that, well, she had answered him.

Still, it wasn’t the kind of paranormal activity he would have expected to witness in a house where the previous owners were said to have been run off by ghosts.

“What happened to breaking things?” he asked. “Or slamming doors? Is that out of style these days?”

She tilted her head, hand resting on what he imagined was once a primer of some kind, to mark her place. “What are you talking about?”

He decided it was worth being honest: “You’re dead, you know.”

She laughed, light and amused, though there was something about her faded expression that looked pained. “I know.”

“How long has it been?”

Her head turned back to the table, tilting down. “A long time,” she said, softly. “Too many years for me to keep track of.”

He was silent for a moment, listening for the sound of the minivan’s tires against the gravel drive. It was silent but for the birds in the trees whose branches settled just outside the window. “You look young.”

“But I’m rather old by now. At least a hundred, I think.”

“You don’t look a day over twenty.” It was a poor attempt at humor, said with a bit of a smile, but he couldn’t help his curiosity. He did so love history—and had once wanted to teach it as a university professor.

That had been little more than a pipe dream, of course, but still, the thought of talking to someone who had actually _lived_ so far in the past: he couldn’t deny how exciting it felt—how surreal it was.

“I died before I turned 20,” she said, straightening a shawl—or something that was supposed to pass for one that was draped around her slim shoulders.

“Of what?” he asked, though perhaps the question was rude.

“Infection, I suppose.” She pulled her shawl around her a little tighter, shifted in her hardback chair. “It was unpleasant.”

He made a face. She could mean anything by that. She could have died of any number of illnesses, or of gangrene or childbirth or—

He heard the sputtering minivan’s engine before he heard the tires hit the gravel. His parents would never believe a bit of this even if he told them. They’d tell him that he was getting old and the loneliness was getting to him. Maybe it was, but it sure seemed real. 

“Well,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets, “I’ve got the rest of the house to tour.”

“And I’ve my studying to finish.” She gave him something that looked like a smile. “But before you go… I’ve a question I’d like to ask.”

“What is it?”

“What’s it like to be alive?”

Though he’d never expected to answer such a question in his life, it almost seemed like a natural question for a ghost to ask. She probably couldn’t remember what it was like anymore, if she had been this way for more than a hundred years. 

He returned her smile, though it was crooked, and shrugged slightly. “I don’t know any other state of being,” he offered, “so it’s all there is for me.”

“Oh.” She flickered, almost as if she was a hologram from an old science fiction movie. “I think I understand your meaning.”

And then she was gone, leaving him in an empty room. It might have been a study, once, if the desk was any indication. Perhaps it had even been a playroom—or a bedroom. Either way, he imagined that when it was built it had looked grand. He wondered at it as he made his way back downstairs and sat at the kitchen table.

His dad shuffled into the kitchen and dropped two boxes of pizza down in front of him. “You have a look around?”

“Sure did.”

“What’d you think of the place?”

“…It’s interesting,” he said. “Looks sound, structurally speaking. I’m not sure about the wiring—probably not a good idea to trust it, though. I’ll have to take a look at the grounds to see if you’re likely to be approved for building permits for a garage of any kind.” He hesitated. “Do you know the history of the place?”

His mom shook her head. “The town over the hill has the records on micro-whatevers,” she said, “but we haven’t had the time to go to the library to see them. I’d like to know, though. A place like this… It just seems like it probably had an interesting history, doesn’t it?”

Roy looked out the window to the faded stone birdbath where sparrows were rinsing their feathers enthusiastically in the rainwater that had collected there. He wondered if anything was stored away in the upper room that might have been interesting to look at. Something in one of the crates, perhaps. He had been so focused on talking to the ghost girl that he hadn’t spent much time looking around.

“I imagine so,” he said, and resolved to go to the library first thing in the morning himself to see what he could dig up.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I daydream about turning this into an actual story, tbh.


End file.
